Answer by Cameron Pope for In Ruby what does the "receiver" refer to?

In Ruby (and other languages that take inspiration from SmallTalk) objects are thought of as sending and receiving 'messages'.

In Ruby, Object, the base class of everything, has a send method: Object.send For example:

class Klass  def hello"Hello!"  endendk = Klass.newk.send :hello     #=> "Hello!"k.hello           #=> "Hello!"

In both of these cases k is the receiver of the 'hello' message.